State think tank Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) urged the government to immediately address the human resource (HR) distribution in the Department of Education (DepED) to allow teachers to focus more on teaching.
PIDS, in a policy note released recently, said that there was currently an “insufficient support and administrative, if any, for teachers in public schools,” which, in turn, affects the quality of their teaching.
The policy note was reporting the results of focus group discussions with public school teachers and interviews with school and division administrators in seven field sites around the country.
The report, written by Clarissa David, Jose Ramon Albert and Jana Flor Vizmanos, highlighted that several additional administrative or student support roles were assigned to each teacher on top of their regular full-time teaching load.
“These include paperwork on seminars and trainings they are tasked to attend and additional designations in line with student guidance, budget, disaster response, and health. Teachers are likewise expected to participate in the implementation of various government programs, such as mass immunizations, community mapping, conditional cash transfer, deworming, feeding, population census, antidrug, election, among others,” the policy note said.
The authors of the report, however, noted that according to the interviewees, the administrative tasks were not figured into the staffing patterns in public institutions.
“While private schools employ administrative staff to do enrolment, registration, records, daily operations, and janitorial services, among others, there is insufficient support and administrative staff, if any, for the teachers in public schools. This means that the teachers are doing the administrative work — a situation that while hidden from view of the normal metrics can erode teaching quality,” they said.
To address these issues, the policy note urged the DepEd to study its HR shortages.
It also urged the Department of Budget and Management to give DepED the needed support to enable it to hire administrative staff and de-load teachers of administrative and other duties unrelated to teaching.
“These posts will fill in for administrative tasks, such as registration and records keeping, secretarial work for the principal’s office, financial reporting, guidance counseling, and other additional assignments normally distributed among regular teaching faculty,” the report said.
Aside from this, the report also highlighted the need to increase salaries of guidance counselors to provide support to students having disciplinary and attitudinal issues.
The policy note also urged DepEd to initiate evidence-based studies on teacher workload.
“Reducing teacher workload needs to be systematic and evidence based. A proper and rigorous time-use study can provide a clear picture of which types of work are necessary to be delegated to teachers and which have to be eliminated from their workload. A more specific breakdown of the exact workload of a regular teacher, the sources of work, and the amount of time left for student contact and actual teaching will allow DepED to pinpoint the sources of the pressures,” the policy note said.
